April 2020

I had nothing else to do with my time thanks to the pandemic, so I did what any reasonable person would do: I impersonated an old man on Twitter.

My account, originally called John W. B. Rich (Wealthy), quickly grew to 5,000 followers within a few weeks.

For some reason, my stupid idea took off. Within a few months, I hit 40,000 followers.

During those first 6 months or so, I was just doing this for fun. Although I treated it like a full-time job, I wasn’t making any money off of it.

“How can I turn this parody account into a real business?” I asked myself.

I chewed on that question for hours and hours during the summer of 2020. Just ask my wife.

I tried out several different ideas, but most of them amounted to very little financial reward. I opened a merch shop that brought in about $30 during the first few weeks. Not even factoring in the cease and desist letter I got from Nikola Corp for violating their trademark, it wasn’t worth it.

I tried a few sponsored posts after that.

A few brands who sold merch or had a stock trading app offered to pay me $50 to $100 per sponsored post. But I found that doing just one cheesy sponsored post caused a significant drop-off in followers and backlash.

There had to be a more self-sustaining way to make some money off my creativity that didn’t cause my audience to hate me, right?

After months of experimenting and making just a few bucks here and there, I found the solution:

Ghostwriting.

My first client was unconventional.

Someone I met on Twitter wanted to start a finance media business, and they needed my help.

It was young guy who had a chunk of money to start a business with. Our initial agreement was $4,000 for the first month of full-time consulting, with one week spent on-site in Austin, Texas (he covered my flight and hotel).

We worked out of his apartment and drank more than a few beers.

The venture ended up going nowhere, but the engagement sent me in a new direction.

I realized there was a lot of money to be made by helping create content for other businesses.

My next two clients happened to be some of the most well-known business Twitter accounts today. I helped grow their accounts from the ~20,000 follower range to above 100,000 followers.

At first, I was just charging $2,000 a month (a bargain for what those clients were getting).

Each client felt like a full-time job because I knew little about project management.

But I slowly learned techniques and systems for adding more clients to my workload.

The bottleneck was always my mental capacity to think creatively for multiple different brands at once. I felt that I could create great ideas for at most two clients per day. Anything above that would diminish the quality.

So over the next couple years, I experimented with my workload and new types of clients.

My peak month was May 2022, when I managed 14 clients and brought in ~$44k in revenue. I managed almost all of it myself, spending about $5k on two contractors to help me out part-time.

About 2 years after beginning this journey, I had solidly achieved my goal of turning my tweets into a full-time business.

After serving dozens of clients and even starting a few media brands with partners, I’ve seen what it takes to turn creative writing into a lucrative online business.

I’ve also seen where people go wrong in turning their writing into a business.

If I had to sum it up in one sentence, I’d say that your writing must somehow translate into dollars for your audience. If not, you will have a difficult time monetizing your creativity.

Here’s how I did it: I gave up on the idea of making money directly from my parody account.

Instead, I used the account as a proof of concept to show that I knew how to grow an account on Twitter.

That’s when I created my personal account to document my strategies and show potential clients how I could help improve their content.

No one would pay me to create a parody account, but real business people would pay me to grow their account because their followers translated directly into more dollars for their business.

Clients were easy to come by after that. I had a solid proof of concept, social proof from current clients, and I knew exactly how to price my services.

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Charlie Light @charliewrich How a meme account became a content agency doing $25k+ a month: 4:4 PM • Apr 3, 2022 125 Retweets 1887 Likes Read 64 replies

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I turned my passion for writing into a profitable business.

The goal of Solo Writers is to help you do the same.

I’ve built my own Solo Writing business that’s profitable and flexible. If I want to take on new clients, I can. If I want to spend my time building up my own media brands, I can do that instead. If I want to try out a wild experiment, I have the time and resources to do it.

I want to help other writers turn their skill into a lucrative business.

There are several ways to make money from writing online — you can build your own media brand, take on ghostwriting clients, start a creative agency, and so much more.

I’ve done many of the above, and want to help others do the same.

I’ll be launching a program to help a few writers do what I did. I don’t know exactly what form it will take on, so I need to hear from you. If you’re interested in what I’ve done and want to do it yourself, please reply directly to this email.

Let me know what your goals are and what your biggest obstacles are. I’ll give you some advice and also use your feedback to craft the program to help other Solo Writers.

You can also sign up for the Solo Writers Community Waitlist here.

I’ll also be writing more about starting a solo writing business here and on my Twitter/X profile. I appreciate everyone who follows along!